This Is How It Took Place: Stories

By Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee

'Prodigious, gifted, precocious: Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee was all of this. It is an incalculable loss to Indian literature that she left us at the age of sixteen.' -- Jeet Thayil. A girl tries in vain to please her mother, a young woman comes to terms with her infidelity, siblings take over each other's identities -- these stories, often told from the perspectives of silent rebels, headstrong loners and nihilistic onlookers, open up the fissures between friendship, love, marriage and familial bonds. Selected and edited by Shinie Antony, these sixteen stories house situations and characters that readers won't forget. Fuelled by a singular and affecting voice, This Is How It Took Place is a truly masterful debut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Nov 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353573843

Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee

Rudrakshi Bhattacharjee (2001--17) did her schooling in Bangalore. She attended Stanford University's residential course in creative writing as a fourteen-year-old, and Johns Hopkins University's Engineering Innovation programme at fifteen. She enjoyed swimming, music, travelling and golf.

Book preview

BA 777 TO ATHENS IS DELAYED

It seems as if I have been waiting here for years.

The bright lights, the steel monochrome, the mechanized smell dull my senses and I find my eyes closing of their own volition. When I arrived at the airport three hours ago, I did not think my flight to Athens would be delayed by twelve hours. So now I am here, resting on these flat black seats with ivory handles that obstruct my body from finding a comfortable position.

A person passes by every ten minutes or so and the smell of coffee from the cup they inevitably carry jolts me awake. An elderly man walks by and I stare at him, at the tufts of white hair sprinkled on his round head and chin. He seems tired, more than what is caused by a delayed flight; his head is drooping and the wiry smile on his face seems a little too crooked. He does not appear to have any luggage, and when he sits down a few seats from me, staring straight ahead with unblinking, steely-grey eyes, I imagine his wife has left him and he is now going to find her and bring her back. It’s a wistful idea, the remnants of a childhood dream of endless true love.

The next person to pass by is a thin, pale woman with her shoulders hunched and her mouth pursed into a tight ‘o’. Her hand is on her son’s back and her fingers are coiled around him tightly, as if someone might try to take him away any moment.

This time it’s not the smell of an espresso that awakens me but the sweet smell of candy. The boy has opened a packet of gummy bears and he gnaws through it ferociously, and I almost laugh because he is holding his candy with the same protectiveness his mother holds him.

No one appears for another twenty minutes and I busy myself with a nearby Health magazine, listening intently to the robotic voice that rings through every few minutes with information about different flights. It is almost god-like how the woman reciting the timings has my fate in her hands and she doesn’t even know it.

A couple appears, laughing and exchanging glances, disrupting the sombre mood of the waiting area. They settle down on the seats with a loud thud and the woman with the son scoffs. Bitterness, I think, wafts through all of us, ready to be incited by almost anything.

The couple’s chatter picks up to a torrential pace and I cannot make out what they are saying in an unfamiliar language, but their voices together sound like the crinkling of gift-wrapping paper. I try to remember the last time I was as happy.

I look over at the woman with the son and see that the boy is now picking out his last gummy bear. I watch his solemn face as he slowly nibbles on the edge of the neon-pink gummy bear before the temptation gets too much for him and he pops it into his mouth. Then he pulls at his mother’s shirt, rubbing her arms and pleading for more, and I think of going up to him and offering to buy it for him.

I look over at the escalator to my left and am surprised by the sheer number of people who are walking up and down. So many people, so many lives I know nothing about.

I look over at the boy again and something about the cross look on his face and the scratchy quality of his voice almost draws me to him. But this is not the time, nor the place.

The waiting area around me which seemed so empty hours ago is now brimming with people. There are bodies sprawled all over the black seats and there are so many faces that it feels impossible to try to recall even one. We are to each other a faceless, nameless crowd conjoined by a common purpose. Just then, it seems disappointing that all we will remember of each other is one delayed flight.

THIS IS HOW IT TOOK PLACE

This is how I remember Antony: sentient and aberrant. Curved chin, topaz jaw, hair sprouting out of his bottle-shaped head. Not beautiful, never that, but intriguing. Rising from beneath the water, his arms on mine, the veins in his neck bulging like thin green snakes trying to push their way out of his skin. Laughing sometimes, throat quivering, chapped lips and a mouth suddenly penetrable. His laugh has always been a quiet, rustling sound; you can hear it only if you try. Then he is beneath the water again, absolved, as if he was never there at all.

I don’t remember how I started cheating on Mark with Antony, but I remember it happened very fast. I knew Antony’s apartment address in a day, his allergies (pollen and tobacco sauce) in another, his relationship with his parents (non-existent) in a week. Somehow my life formed a routine. I spent my days with Mark and my nights with Antony. Comedy shows and then Godard films. Discussions about Central Park and then the Met. Loud, buzzing groups with mimosas and then a solemn bottle of wine. Sometimes I liked to pretend they were the same person and that he was just different in the morning and in the evening. Two sides to the same person. I’ll never get bored, I told myself. It’s like the perfect partner. A two-in-one deal. I repeated this to myself continuously – in cabs, on the subway, standing on pavements as I stared at the reflection of my face in rain puddles, wondering when I had started looking as drained as a rotten grape. They were very similar though, and this made it easier to pretend. Mark liked his coffee with no sugar, as did Antony. Both loved the idea of winter, but admitted that a hot summer was easier to bear. They had both been on their respective school swimming teams. Both worked in sales, although one was a cashier, the other a regional manager. They could have almost been best friends. Meeting on the C train, drinking chilled beers after work, kicking back their feet and loosening their collar and discussing women and sports. I like to think of them that way: old friends fitting into each other comfortably, always laughing at a joke I had told.

An example of a conversation with Antony: ‘We spent our nights on the streets, just walking and looking at the guys selling their paintings. It was beautiful in a way I don’t think I’ll ever experience again.’ Antony pulled at my earlobes the way Mark pulled at my toes. ‘Did you ever buy a painting?’ Antony sighed, smoke blew into my face. ‘We were broke and in college. English majors. We still can’t afford paintings.’

‘You’re not a failure. And you can now.’

‘It’s almost as if you think I love you because you flatter me.’

‘You were young and dumb then – I’m sure you bought some obscure painting. Half a breast, face of a lion.’

‘We were young.’

We were young. Antony said this often, and only when I had not met him for a few days. It was a sore point with him. That he was forty-five and I was twenty-seven and Mark twenty-eight. I told him it’s scandalous. I told him age looks good on him. I told him I’ll love him when he’s grey. I told him all the things I was supposed to tell him. His eyes gleamed, his fingers jokingly reaching for an aspirin lying on the table because he knew that I knew that later he would rummage for Benzedrine in his bathroom cupboards. I wish I could describe the pathos that Antony’s tired figure evinced from me anytime I touched his pulsing warm body as he talked in a flurry of drunken murmurs, even though he had not touched a drop of alcohol. Antony’s guzzling brown irises dilated, the whites of his eyes disappearing. I was always rapacious about Antony’s eyes, I imagined myself swallowing them while I lay with Mark.

On an afternoon I spent with Laura in a Fifth Avenue restaurant I could barely afford, she called Antony the Mysterious Musician even though I had told her numerous times that Antony had never played a musical instrument. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she had said, ‘he just has to be the type.’ I told her she had been watching too many romantic comedies. Laura didn’t find the age thing as strange as I thought she would. But then again, her husband was six years younger than her; she couldn’t judge. Laura met Antony once. She said he was gruff and smug and she made me wonder when I had stopped seeing him the way everyone else saw him. We argued.

‘But Mark’s so much better for you. He’s so nice.’

‘I think so too.’

‘Then why not drop Antony?’ She cupped my face. She thought I liked it when she treated me like her daughter, she thought I had never been shown affection without lust accompanying it. All this analysis from a psych class she had taken in community college more than three decades ago. I called her Grizzly Bear in my head, and not only because she never shaved properly so she pricked my skin anytime her legs brushed against mine. ‘And stay with Mark. I understand the need to break out and try a dangerous thing, but it has been a year now. I mean I get it, the literature thing. But he has the personality of a brush.’

‘I’m just enjoying myself.’

She petted me disconcertedly before licking the large brownie on her plate and gulping it down. As I stared at the thin wrinkles on her face that made it look like she was always squinting and the alarming whiteness of her hair, I wondered why I continually surrounded myself with people who were at least ten years older than me.

‘Just don’t get too attached. What happens if Mark doesn’t forgive you?’

I didn’t see her much after that.

Places I have visited with Mark:

A deli on a street in Chelsea that we found by accident

Coney Island

A YouTube Space Gordo’s Bar

An open mic night at an LGBTQ friendly bar where Mark sang ‘My heart will go on’

The Strand

Mark’s parents’ house on the Upper East Side

Staten Island.

Places I have visited with Antony:

His apartment.

When I first told Mark I loved him, it was because of how he smelled that day. He smelled like detergent and smoked ham. He reminded me of the liveliness of a Sunday brunch and the openness of cafés with rooftop seating. He reminded me of houses with long hallways and mirrors running from one end to the other. He reminded me of baby-blue walls and bright orange curtains and white fruit bowls and marble kitchen islands. When I first told Mark I loved him, he bought me a gold pendant. When we fought, I gave it back. When we made up, he gave me a new one. This was how it was with Mark. Endless chances and charity donations. A life of two kids, country clubs and a tennis court on which he would let me win if I asked.

Antony, I knew, I would never marry. It wasn’t even because we rarely agreed or because there were always aching silences between us or because he was always so angry that he needed to chew Benzedrine to sit upright. It wasn’t even because anytime I kissed him I had to pretend I could not taste the sour bite of a previous cigarette or because I never knew what he was going to do until he did it. It wasn’t even the age thing, although I had wondered about that at first. It was because when I told him I was with Mark, he scowled and then laughed and said, ‘I’m sorry that this has happened. And I’m sorry that I love you as well.’

Towards the end of my relationship with Antony and the start of my marriage with Mark, Antony finally began to share his poems with me. He was like a more callous Allen Ginsberg and sometimes I found him dry and witless. But I liked the idea of having my very own Beat poet, tightened and caged and leashed to me. I only seemed to live for the idea of things, I was slowly realizing. I never had any time to give to the reality of situations.

The reason I broke up with Antony and spent three weeks in misery while Mark rubbed my back, applied ointment and combed my hair before finally proposing to me was because of what Antony said when I told him I didn’t want to choose between him and Mark. He said, ‘And that’s another thing I hate about women. A woman finds a million ways to tell a man he’s useless without having to say it out loud.’ I told him I always knew he hated women. He chuckled. It was a really ugly, throaty sound. I only thought it was a chuckle because it was easier to think that than think of it as something harsher, like the clearing of his throat. ‘Even my barber knows that.’

I told him he was a homosexual. Then I told him I didn’t mind if he was, but that I’d known all along. ‘I’m not gay,’ he said.